Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2011

[sandboxsam]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

It looks like the consensus is that throttling 'does' exist.

When did G begin employing it?

What determines a website's 'share' of traffic?

Has Matt C ever been asked about this?

[edited by: tedster at 6:51 pm (utc) on Jan 2, 2011]

[tedster]

Note that we've got another thread where a few people are reporting a dramatic wipe-out beginning Dec 28, right at the change into the new year: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Pudders]

For info... saw another shuffle over-night, a couple of searches came back stronger but still seems to be a bit unsettled.

[MichaelEdits]

Something's definitely happening. My site's rankings are going up, presumably due to some changes I made about two weeks ago.

[indyank]

@MichaelEdits, so G is turning out to be good to you now :) What changes did you do?

[MichaelEdits]

Actually, my Google ratings have always been very pleasing to me. What I think my site is about and what they think my site is about always seems to agree.

Recently, I realized that I'd become far too much of a generalist and polyglot, largely because I didn't know "what I want to be when I grow up." I dumped some deadwood, wrote some new content, and waited for Google to catch up. It did.

[Pudders]

Actually, my Google ratings have always been very pleasing to me

Don't put the "kiss of death" on it! lol :)

[indyank]

Ok...that was a good move :)

So "Something's definitely happening" may not be what is happening to your site now...It is just that G is liking you better now, as you are trying to be a pro than being a generalist... :)

[dickbaker]

Here's an odd one to ponder.

My traffic has almost been in a holding pattern for weeks, not breaking above 80% of what it was last year. It's been hard to tell if Google has been holding back, but possible.

On Sunday it broke out, and is still very close to last year's numbers.

What's also odd about this is the reporting from Google Analytics. For years GA reported more page views than did my stats program. Late last year it started reporting fewer page views than my stats program. When my traffic broke out of the holding pattern on Sunday, GA started showing more page views than my stats.

I can't figure that one out, but I'm not unhappy about it.

[Pudders]

I am seeing my reaults drop again this moring... and across all DCs ... not happy! Could understand if it was for certain keywords...but not for most! Hope it's a jitter.

[trinorthlighting]

I am seeing some backlinks churning......

[Pudders]

looks like our drop could be a permanat one as all the DCs now show the same results! Frustrating as hell as our competitor sites are never really updatedand have so many broken links! I'm always on top of ours!

[MelissaLB]

We're in panic mode over here, just lost 75% of our organic traffic. We're not sure why. It happened to us on the 28th as well. We're unsure how to proceed as we've always put a lot of efforts into SEO and upgrading the technology of our website (retail shopping site). no one over here is an SEO genius either. everything we've done so far, we've done through the consensus online about what are 'good seo practices'.

A lot of our links come from places like forums and blogs, most do, I would say about 80% do. In WMT we show very few errors ever, maybe 3 or 4 timed out/unreachable over the past few months, most of which cleared up on their own. The one thing i did notice was that our crawl rate increased by double in Dec and dropped in Jan. Also, the speed at which the bots were able to download a page increased by about double as well... But We're not skilled in this, and not exactly sure what to make of this.

Unfortunately, we depend on Google for $80 of our sales and without warning it has almost melted away completely.

It is my understanding that many other sites are experiencing this. What are you doing to react? What do you expect is the cause of this? What can we do to ease the panic and get back in Google's good graces? after all, we are a good company, white hat seo, fresh content, user friendly, all the good things that google wants. What could we have done wrong?

Thanks for any help. I am still quite new at this and could use any guidance. Feel free to pm me as well. Thanks!

[TheMadScientist]

looks like our drop could be a permanat one as all the DCs now show the same results!

Out of curiosity, how do you know?

A single IP address can be routed to multiple DCs...
Is there some new way to check or something?

[Pudders]

I use [webrankinfo.com...] to check... Each DC over the space of 3 days all displayed the same. It wasn't like they all changed at once! One day one would display dropped rankings and then two more DCs the following day and then all of them! It was a trend - they all followed suit.

[Jez123]

Is anyone seeing any return to normal traffic and conversions? This week traffic seems slow traffic wise - about 20 - 30% lower than usual but conversions seem more mormal. It's early to tell yet though.

[wheel]

This may be completely nonsensical, but as of today two keyword rich domains (mine, the .com and the .org) jumped from the second page to spots #1 and #3.

I have done next to no link building on the site, maybe a half dozen spread out over 6 months. The other folks have been hard at it.

Hard to tell of course, but it seems since it happened to two unrelated domains, it's like G turned up the importance of keywords in the domain. {end speculation}

[indyank]

Some weird stuff w.r.t links again - In GWT, for a page I see 29 links from 30 source domains!

For the same site, I also see lower number of links now reported for internal pages, for some days now.Could this be hurting people this Jan?

I was trying to dig into this site (though the overall traffic to it remained the same) as the top pages weren't getting the same vol. of traffic as earlier and some pages lost some ranking.But this seem to have been compensated to some extent with traffic from other pages.

[tedster]

For those who watch the Google toolbar - new PageRank values have been exported today. Here's our thread for the "PR Update" discussion [webmasterworld.com]

[Interista]

Hi, this is my first post here so please bar with me :)
It's interesting reading here because we recently got a ranking slap from google for our site. We went from the first position to the secind page, adn the crawled back to the first page two days after. But not in the top positions.

Oddly enough there are now sites that have never been visible in the first 3 pages up in the top 10 results. These changes occured around mid January. Anyone else seen the same thing?
thx

[edited by: tedster at 1:31 pm (utc) on Jan 24, 2011]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[indyank]

Welcome to the forums and yes I do see a lot of shuffles after mid Jan.

[maximillianos]

I think ever since caffeine we have all seen some movement every month and will probably continue to see monthly fluctuations from here on out. Google is capable of crunching and crawling a lot more data now so they can be more real time. Pre-caffeine the index was pretty static once they deemed it ready. Now it is Antibes guess where your site will rank from month to month.

[tedster]

We've got a couple reports of a significant shift at Google yesterday - see this dedicated thread started by backdraft7:

January 26 2011 Traffic Change - Back to "Zombie Traffic" [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: tedster at 5:11 pm (utc) on Jan 27, 2011]

[indyank]

yes google has been churning around for long now but they don't stop there...they do bring in tidal waves every month .........

but to be honest, I am not seeing any "bad" coming up, in a few niches that i track...

[tedster]

And today we have Google's Matt Cutts making it official that they've launched the new algo aimed at ranking "scraper sites or sites with less original content lower."

[webmasterworld.com...]

[siri_om]

i see serp shuffles - would better call them mess ups - since mid january on g.com and g.co.uk.

i dont really see its being about the uniqueness of the content however - all sites in my niche are small 5-10 pages (offering service), with their quality, amount, freshness, relevancy and uniqueness of content being about the same.

what i see instead is that the sites which built significant amounts of links recently having the biggest shuffle amplitude, jumping back and forth page 1 to page 8.

the top sites that done no link building recently are more less intact.

i cant really see how such dramatic shifts could be caused by content quality, which, i repeat, doesnt differ that huge much.

the only explanation coming to my mind might be that g devalued some sites from which the backlinks to dancing sites are coming. but then it would be plain drop, not dance...

[tedster]

According to comments this thread [webmasterworld.com], both backdraft7 and MelissaLB - yesterday (Jan 30) saw a ranking shift of some kind. It was bad for backdraft7 and a small improvement for MelissaLB - but in her words

Since Friday, our serps are all over the place. we've been monitoring about 10-15 keywords daily and there seems to be no rhyme or reason, some have gaining, some are losing.

Has anyone else seen this shift?

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >